Excerpt from my final paper

Yellowstone national park is visited by hundreds of people daily for it’s scenic beauty and diverse wildlife. The multitude of hot springs and geysers makes it an exciting place to venture into for people of every age. With attractions such as Old Faithful, Yellowstone is one of the most renowned and unique parks in the United States. However, what many people don’t know is that while they walk the peaceful trails and enjoy time in the wild, a soup of molten hot rock is brewing just below the surface. In some places it is as close as five miles below! This is because Yellowstone National Park is the location of one of the largest super volcanoes in the world, and it is still young and active. For some reason many people have not heard about Yellowstone’s active volcano, even though if it were to erupt the entirety of the United States would most likely perish and the rest of the world would suffer catastrophic consequences; including a mass extinction of the human race. Many people are unaware of the threat because the information is relatively new even for scientists. Yellowstone is not found along a fault line so many scientists had doubts that a volcano could exist there at all. It is located on a hot spot, or a large magma upwelling that is also known as a caldera. Furthermore, since the last eruption, “about 640,000 years ago” (Yellowstone supervolcano is cool), the park’s landscape was altered in such a way that it no longer resembles the average volcano’s shape. “Super volcanoes may not look much, but their potential for destruction is many times greater than a traditional volcanic eruption” (Yellowstone's Slumbering Giant). Most volcanoes are conical, an example would be Mount Vesuvius, while the Yellowstone volcano is flat along one side due to the previous eruption. In that eruption half of the volcano was blown away, leaving a type of valley in its place, it resembles a peaceful basin more than an environmental bomb. What people do need to realize is that an eruption at Yellowstone is much more likely than say, a meteor hitting the earth. “Asteroids that are more than one kilometer in size only hit the earth around every 100,000 years. Super eruptions however occur in half that time, about once every 50,000 years”(Will we be wiped out by a super-eruption?) and they are just as deadly.